The paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To the 310th anniversary of the author of “The New Heloise” and “The Social Contract”

We habitually rank Jean-Jacques Rousseau among the circle of French enlighteners, forgetting, however, that in fact he was originally from Geneva, decisively broke with the Parisian encyclopedists, and owed his lifetime fame primarily to the only novel he wrote, and not to philosophical treatises . And yet, he did no less to shape modern European culture than Voltaire or Diderot. Natalya Pakhsaryan speaks especially for Gorky about these and other paradoxes that filled the life and work of this amazing man, whose birth was exactly 310 years old.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarity, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was noted for his undeniable diversity of talents and versatility of creativity: he is called a political and religious philosopher, pedagogical theorist, musicologist and composer, novelist, one of the first autobiographers, a predecessor of anthropology and the founder of sociology. At the same time, he is an extremely controversial figure. An extraordinary philosopher-educator, Rousseau occupies a special place among other thinkers of the Enlightenment: if Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot thought about how to improve the existing civilization through education and upbringing of people, then Rousseau did not accept it entirely, relying on the “natural man”, living in harmony with nature, preserving moral purity in his naivety and lack of education. The question posed by the Dijon Academy, “Did the revival of the sciences and arts contribute to the purification of morals,” found a decisively negative answer from the Genevan who arrived in Paris: he saw only deception in these achievements of civilization. Nevertheless, Rousseau's life and work are inseparable from the Enlightenment, once again demonstrating the irreducibility of this phenomenon to static ideas shared by all members of this movement.

Having gone through the stage of admiring interest in the French enlightenment, Rousseau quickly became disillusioned with their theories and began to create his own system of views. Jean-Jacques's disputes and quarrels with yesterday's idols seem to reinforce the traditional view of critics that if Voltaire and Diderot demonstrate intelligence and the ability to reason, then in Rousseau one can find almost only feeling and imagination. In the autobiographical “Confession” (1765–1770), posthumously published in 1782–1789, the author himself claimed that he “began to feel before thinking,” and in every possible way emphasized his special, individual, acute sensitivity. It is no coincidence that this autobiographical novel, showing, in the words of the author himself, “man in all the truth of his nature,” paved the way for the confessional psychological prose of romanticism.

It is worth remembering, however, the ironic remark of the modern researcher Bernard Guyon: “I discovered that Rousseau was smart.” Indeed, if Jean-Jacques had not been able to reason, he would not have created his philosophical and political treatises, the main of which, “The Social Contract” (1762), is devoted to the problem of the reasonable construction of a civil society. Some provisions of this treatise were included in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” during the French Revolution of 1789–1794, and the revolutionaries Saint-Just and Marat read excerpts from it to a crowd of people. If this treatise had not had a rationalistic foundation justifying the need for political and economic equality of citizens, it would not have allowed us to consider Rousseau “the first actual democrat in the history of mankind” (Tamara Dlugach). Considering the “state of nature” as a desirable ideal, the philosopher proposed that peoples draw up such an agreement that would allow each person to regain the integrity and purity of his nature, originally given to him by nature, to be free and happy, and which would at the same time be the result of the general will of the people. Developing the teachings of Rousseau, Vladimir Bibler wrote: “Only that modern society is eternal and democratic, which retains in its roots the democratic right of its citizens to anew , initially, initially generate and contractually consolidate their own legal structures.”

Rousseau saw education as a way to achieve such a civil state, interpreting it differently than the encyclopedists of the Enlightenment: education should eliminate the harmful influence of life in a vain society spoiled by civilization, it should take place far from artificial culture. The sensory sensitivity given to a child by nature will allow him to learn more and better about the world around him than he would learn from the books he is forced to read, and from the abstract sciences with which parents try to replace practical experience. The writer outlined the program for such a free “natural education” in his treatise “Emil, or On Education” (1762). This work outraged the French parliament, which sentenced the book to burning and its author to imprisonment, from which Rousseau was saved by his decision to leave Paris and the favor of the bailiffs sent for him, who did not detain him on the road. And this same treatise was not only adopted by families contemporary to the philosopher, who began to pay more attention to children’s walks in the fresh air and began to ensure that mothers fed their children with their own milk, and did not give them to wet nurses. But he also had a huge influence on the development of subsequent pedagogical thought. Paradoxically, Rousseau himself did not raise his own five children, distributing them to orphanages. This, however, did not affect the authority of “Newton in the field of morality” (Kant): he laid the foundation for the broad ideological and philosophical movement of “Rousseauism” and made popular the myth of the “virtuous savage”.

A philosopher and teacher, Rousseau also aspired to be perceived as a professional composer and musicologist. As a young man, he came to Paris to offer the musical community his own system of musical notation; by the age of thirty he had composed several compositions; he was entrusted with articles on music in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedia of Sciences, Arts and Crafts; he entered into controversy with the most famous composer of France in the 18th century, Jean-Philippe Rameau, defending the more important role of melody than harmony; he finally composed the music and libretto for the opera “The Village Sorcerer,” which was a success among his contemporaries. It is curious that the same Saint-Just and Marat were not only fans of Rousseau’s socio-political ideas, but also performed arias from this opera.

Of course, the quintessence of reader success was the book “Julia, or the New Heloise”: by 1800 it had been reprinted 72 times, it received an unprecedented number of responses in periodicals, it caused a huge wave of letters from readers to the author, there were not enough copies in libraries for everyone, and the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant, known for his strict adherence to the daily routine, missed an afternoon walk for the only time in his life while reading this novel. Moreover, in January 1761, when “The New Heloise” was published, Rousseau was already almost 50 years old, but his fame until then was quite modest: neither “Emile” nor “The Social Contract” had yet been written by him. However, the famous 19th century critic Emile Faguet believed that these future works of Rousseau were also novels: “The Social Contract,” for example, is a novel about an ideal society, “Discourse on Inequality” is a novel about human nature, etc. But in In this case, the discovery of a “romantic” component in Rousseau’s treatises was an argument for the critic to reduce the value of his political and social reflection. In fact, for Rousseau, who longed not for the dry persuasion of readers, but for their kind of “seduction” (as philologist Christina Amman put it) by the course of the writer’s thoughts, this “romantic” is important as a way to captivate the audience and provide them with an interesting, but at the same time useful reading .

And yet, the philosopher’s coming to write a novel is quite paradoxical: a critic of artificiality, he should have shunned a genre that has a reputation for being overly conventional and implausible. True, both youthful and adult reading of Rousseau was saturated with romantic prose of the 17th century. The writer’s passion for d’Urfe’s pastoral novel “Astraea” is stated by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, to whom Jean-Jacques, who has read this work twice, advises him to also read it carefully and leisurely. In Rousseau's texts, scholars find frequent references to the gallantly heroic novel "Cassandra" by La Calpreneda; in "Confession" he himself writes about the connection between the plot of "New Heloise" and Madame de Lafayette's novel "The Princess of Cleves" (the Princess of Cleves' confession to her husband of her love for the Duke Nemoursky is close to Julia’s confession to Monsieur de Wolmar of his love for Saint-Preux). But it was no coincidence that the writers of the Enlightenment, captured by the desire to naturalize writing, avoided classifying their works as novels: this idealizing genre went out of fashion.

Feeling somewhat uneasy about turning to this kind of writing, Jean-Jacques defined himself in Confessions as a “reluctant novelist” suddenly seized by “poetic madness”: having experienced a dramatic love story at the Hermitage Villa (partly reflected in the plot of “New Heloise” ), and then settling on the estate of the Count of Luxembourg, he intended to devote himself entirely to philosophical writings, but instead began to write history in letters to “two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps.” We can say that with such a subtitle, the author creates in readers the expectation of a love novel, and then not only deceives, but exceeds such an expectation: he does not strive for his novel to be perceived only as a sensitive love story, the reader’s reflection on serious social problems is important to him . Thus, although Rousseau obviously evokes an association with the tragic love story of the 12th-century theologian Pierre Abelard and his student Heloise, updated by Alexander Pope’s poem translated into French, he introduces into the plot the problem of social inequality: Saint-Pré, Julia’s teacher, is a commoner, whereas she is a noblewoman, and this becomes an additional obstacle to the union of lovers. The letters that the characters exchange while apart demonstrate not only the nuances of love feelings, but also contain a description of the vices of city life that Saint-Pré encounters on his journey. In general, in Rousseau’s novel, the style and intonation of which differ from the style of his treatises, one can nevertheless find similarities with their problematics: Fabrice Moulin, for example, believes that if in the “Social Contract” we are talking about changing the conditions of political existence, and in “Emil” - about the transformation of the principles of upbringing and education, then in “New Heloise” the author raises the question of changing human relationships based on sexual desire. Rousseau's feeling is saturated here with moral value and does not come into conflict with reason, but acts together with it, elevating a person. Thus, the novel is both connected with and transforms the idealistic concept of “high” love presented in Astrea. Rousseau enjoyed reading Baroque romance novels, but he did not imitate them, just as he did not imitate the “father of the epistolary novel,” Samuel Richardson, who created his own type of novelistic narrative in letters.

The writer, as we know, forbade chaste girls to read The New Heloise, but at the same time imagined spouses as his ideal readers: “I am pleased to imagine how a married couple, reading this collection of letters, will draw from it new courage in order to bear together the burden of their labors and the desire to make them useful. Really, having seen a picture of family happiness in this book, they will not feel that their own union is becoming closer and stronger? The appearance of Saint-Preux in Clarens as a teacher for the children Julia and Volmar introduces pedagogical issues into the novel. And the story of how Monsieur de Wolmar manages his farm in Clarens provides a thread to the economic ideas of Rousseau, which he sets out in his treatises. The novelist sets the task of “showing wealthy people that both rural life and agriculture have their joys... a respectable person who would like to retire with his entire family to the village and take the place of his tenant could lead a life there as pleasant as as well as among city entertainments...”

In addition, Rousseau reflects in the novel on the essence of religious feeling, on faith and unbelief, on the principle of tolerance. The writer himself, raised in Calvinist Geneva, at a certain stage of his life converted to Catholicism, then abandoned it, but did not become a consistent Protestant, but established for himself, on the basis of “reason, feeling and nostalgia,” a “religion of the heart.” This form of belief did not require intermediaries between the individual and the deity; it was based on the “inner light,” as the writer himself put it, and, perhaps, was not quite a religion, and not quite a philosophy. In the novel, the author wondered about the benefits of the canonical form of religion for society, about its boundaries and functions. Despite the fact that, like Voltaire, Rousseau was sharply opposed to atheism, he does not strive for the radicalism of his treatises in the novel, he tries to soften the confrontation between philosophers and believers. The writer advocates tolerance and, although, in his opinion, the lack of faith is dangerous for society, he paints the atheist Mr. de Wolmar with not black paint, turning him into a virtuous character. The title character, a Christian, a sincere believer, on the one hand, exposes religious intolerance, which deprives believers of all sympathy for dissidents and kindness, and on the other hand, she cannot come to terms with her husband’s unbelief and feels a kind of moral superiority over him. And Mr. de Wolmar turns out to be consistent in his tolerance: not only does he not try to turn Julia away from religion, he accepts her piety with understanding, but he also does not push away Saint-Preux, for whom his wife confessed her love to him. He agrees to live with the teacher on his estate and trusts him with the upbringing of his children. Through such paradoxical nuances in the characters' characters, Rousseau invites readers to think about the proposed problems, dissolved in the lyrical and poetic intonation of the novel, but clearly felt in it. The text of “The New Heloise” turns out to be not a mechanical combination of philosophical reasoning with romantic intrigue, but the embodiment of the spirit of a truth-seeking author, at the same time a sensitive sentimentalist and a person who remains “a philosopher in the feeling itself” (Paul Benichou). In this non-dogmatic thought, the ability to discuss emerging questions, and not give unambiguous answers to them, to doubt, to assume, to search, the sentimentalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued so fiercely with Diderot and Voltaire, paradoxically finds himself on the same position with them and continues the work of the Enlightenment.